The dream came again.
It always began with fire. Not the screaming chaos of war, but a slow, solemn blaze—like a funeral pyre that had forgotten what it was mourning. Towers of glass and gold melted into molten rivers. Figures stood atop a shattered palace, cloaked in divine light and shadows that writhed like living chains. And in the center: a woman with silver hair, falling to her knees.
Her hands clutched a broken locket. Her lips formed a name.
Ralph.
He awoke before she could say it.
The dormitory was cold and quiet, save for the faint hum of mana lanterns lining the hall. His breath misted as he sat up in the narrow bed, fingers clenched against the ache in his chest. It wasn't fear. It wasn't grief. It was something deeper—like a truth remembered by a body long after the mind forgot.
He wiped the sweat from his brow and glanced at the ticking aetherclock. Fifth Bell. Too early for class, too late to go back to sleep. Again.
Ralph swung his legs over the edge of the bed and reached for the worn notebook on his desk. It was filled with pages of arcane theory, neat formulas, and fragments of runes he couldn't remember writing. He had no magical lineage. No noble blood. Yet some part of him moved instinctively through the principles of spellcraft—like he wasn't learning, but relearning.
They told him he was a late bloomer. That his aptitude for magic was strange but promising. That the System would awaken for him in time.
But the System hadn't spoken to him. Not once.
He was the only student in the Academy without a mana core.
And he was running out of excuses.
The lecture hall smelled of chalk dust and ambition. Students murmured across marble benches, cloaks fluttering with enchanted thread and family sigils. Ralph sat near the back, quill poised, as Professor Luceris swept into the room.
Golden-haired, robed in white and gold, Luceris looked too young to teach—and too beautiful to be trusted. But his voice held gravity, and when he lectured on divine philosophy, even the most arrogant heirs quieted.
"Tell me," Luceris began, gesturing toward the blackboard with a flick of his hand. "Why do the gods no longer walk among us?"
A few hands rose.
"Because they were sealed," answered a boy from House Velmire. "The Tablet of Faith."
"Because they betrayed us," said a girl from House Ilyane, eyes sharp with disdain. "The Demon War proved it."
Luceris smiled. "Both true. And yet not the whole truth."
He paced slowly, chalk trailing lines across the board. "The gods ruled by miracle and myth. But miracles require faith. And when mortals begin to question, even gods must retreat."
His gaze swept the room, and lingered—just briefly—on Ralph.
"And so we ask: what gives power to divinity? Worship? Fear? Or perhaps… knowledge?"
The chalk stopped. The runes on the board mirrored one Ralph had drawn in the margins of his dream journal.
His pulse quickened.
"Those who seek truth," Luceris said quietly, "must first be willing to lose everything they believe."
Later, Ralph stood alone in the training grounds. He watched the other students practice spell formation, conjuring wind blades and flame sigils. His own hands remained still.
He could feel the mana. He could even trace it through the air, like threads of a half-forgotten pattern. But every time he tried to shape it—to form a core within himself—it slipped through his grasp.
He wasn't weak. He was wrong.
And somewhere inside, something knew why.
Beneath the school, hidden beneath wards and sigils too ancient for even the headmaster to read, a ritual began.
In a forgotten chamber, robed figures knelt before a statue of a man with no face. They chanted in tongues never written, praising a name forbidden to speak above ground.
Not "Absolute."
But The Ascended.
And above them, high on a balcony wrapped in shadow, a woman with crimson eyes watched the boy on the training field.
"I found him," whispered Vaelith Nyzara.
"The broken soul. The false heir."
Her lips curved into a smile far older than the school's foundations.
"The Hero who wasn't."